Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Making Rudyard Kipling Proud

We wish to question a deeply engrained habit of thinking among students of evolution. We call it the adaptationist programme, or the Panglossian paradigm.S.J. Gould & R.C. Lewontin (1979) p. 584A typical just-so story has two components. First, it postulates the existence of an allele "for" some trait in the absence of evidence that the gene(s) actually exist (or even that such genes are possible). Second, it postulates that the allele "for" the trait was selected in the past so that now it has become fixed in the population. The attractiveness of most just-so stories lies in the creation of an elaborate, but plausible, adaptive advantage for the postulated allele.

The field of evolutionary psychology seems to have been largely taken over by those who can create the most elaborate just-so stories to "explain" modern society. For example, the avoidance of incest in most (but not all) societies is due to fixation of an anti-incest gene in our ancestors [Another Boring Just-so Story]. As with most just-so stories, there is no evidence for the existence of multiple alleles of a gene where one allele confers incest avoidance while the other allele confers acceptance of incestuous relationships. (The problem becomes even more difficult if it's a trait due to multiple alleles at different loci.)

There's a trendy extension of just-so storytelling that looks superficially like evidence. It's the creation of a computer program to simulate one's just-so story. Naturally, these programs always work as expected since that's the nature of a just-so story. You have a postulated beneficial allele with a postulated selective advantage and, presto!, the allele becomes fixed in your simulated population. It doesn't prove a thing. If your program doesn't work as expected, then all you have to do is fiddle with the selective advantage (s) until it does.

This year's fad in just-so stories is the religion gene. Here's one of the latest from NewScientist, which should know better [Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests]. The article reviews the speculations of James Dow, an Emeritus Professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oakland University in Michigan.

To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

Make no mistake. This is bad science. It does not meet any of the criteria of good science.

From time to time we challenge the veracity of press releases so it's always wise to check the source to see if the views of the author have been misrepresented. In this case, the original paper is online at The Jounral of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation website [Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?]. Here's the abstract. You can read the article and decide for yourself whether you think this is a worthwhile contribution to the literature on evolution.

Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.

How many of you think that this work supports the just-so story and refutes other possibilities?

My supervisor teaches an entire 4th year undergraduate biology class about the subject of 'just-so' stories and how they relate to the study of human origins (I prefer Jared Diamond's term for these: paleopoetry).

What I find frustrating about many of these types of studies is that they make no attempt to refute the hypothesis of neutral evolution in any of their models (or any other type of indirect selection based model such as linkage with another trait). I'd also prefer a more satisfactory way of ruling out a cultural basis rather than genes as a negative hypothesis.

It's completely inconceivable that we have specific genes for every single type of behaviour that can be given a name. If behaviours are obviously the product of multiple genes, then selection for certain types of behaviour (e.g., the desire for sex, dichotomization of 'in-group' and 'out-group', etc.) must affect other types of behaviour. Thus modeling the evolution of behaviours in isolation is probably as effective (and potentially misleading) as modeling the evolution of individual codons without taking into account the surrounding genome.

Computer simulations aren't necessarily bad science. They can provide rigorous evidence of what outcomes are POSSIBLE or NECESSARY, for a given set of assumptions or observations. In this role simulations can be very valuable in confirming or debunking proposed explanations. For example, if someone did find genetic variation for the kind of trait Dow assumes, a simulation would help us identify how evolutionary forces could or could not act on it.

Problems arise when we forget, as the author of the New Scientist article seems to have done, that the inputs are assumptions, not facts.

I don't think the description "just so stories" is very good, in the sense that many things in biology sound like just so stories, even when they are fully documented. So, the result is that some things get called unfairly just so stories that do not deserve it (creationists use this mistake to their advantage, by the way); also, some fictional adaptationist elements can be sometimes interspersed with actually quite interesting data. I read them "sieving" the adaptationism out.

"Panglossian", while requiring a little bacgkround on Voltaire, conveys what the criticism to adaptationism is about.

An interestig thing is that within adaptationists that often get it wrong, you will find that many will declare themselves 1) Rationalist 2) Empirical. Such people can be prone to think adaptationism is in some trivial and direct manner "just the way it is", a fact as undeniable as stones will fall. No alternatives!

Creationists are another case of those who think their religious picture is simply... "the way it is"

If I understand correctly, these authors:1. constructed a computer simulation of the spread (to fixation) of an allele in a population2. constructed a selection gradient in silico that gave increased reproductive success to one allele3. ran their simulation with that selection gradient.

There is a market. They get notes in the news and press on things like "why having a crooked nose is maladaptive" or "why do men prefer blondes".

That's the only reason why this kind of crap floats; it gets a scientific appearance by invoking a "darwinian hypotheses", and deals with a topic people get all excited about. (Notice too that many theists love this kind of hypothesis: belief is a natural outcome)

The press eats this up, you know, like those studies of the kind "avoiding hiccups makes you live longer".

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

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The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.